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MONTREAL - The city of Montreal is flouting a new provincial law requiring municipalities to post online all contracts over $25,000 that was supposed to bring more transparency to Quebec’s troubled contract-awarding process in the public sector, a Gazette investigation has discovered.

As of April 1, municipalities and municipal agencies, such as public-transit authorities, must publish contracts worth at least $25,000 on the Quebec government’s official website for calls for tenders, the Système électronique d’appel d’offres, or SEAO, along with the names of the recipients, the names of other bidders and their bids and a brief description of the contract. The Quebec government introduced the requirement through an amendment to the Cities and Towns Act last year.

However, five months after the requirement went into effect, only a fraction of the contracts awarded by Montreal and its 19 boroughs have been posted to the public database, the Gazette investigation uncovered.

The city and its boroughs award $1.5 billion in goods and services contracts to companies and professionals each year.

In fact, no one is policing the SEAO database, the Municipal Affairs Department confirmed this week. Moreover, no penalties exist for municipal bodies that ignore the law.

The Gazette plans to make public next week a searchable database of Montreal municipal contracts that it built over the summer. The database will be ongoing and will include contracts awarded in the last five years.

As of Thursday, the SEAO database contained 337 contracts, including for subsidies and leases, awarded by the city and boroughs since April 1. The SEAO database is supposed to include all contracts awarded by the city executive committee, in the case of city-level contracts, borough councils for local contracts, and civil servants, who can award smaller contracts internally without going to the executive committee or borough council.

Yet an examination of executive committee and borough council resolutions since April shows that more than 2,100 contracts were awarded by those bodies during the same time period.

The Ville Marie borough council, for example, passed 117 contractual matters at its public meetings between April and September. Yet the SEAO database contains just 48 contracts, including for leases and subsidies, awarded by the borough since April.

The city executive committee, meanwhile, awarded 209 contracts at weekly meetings between April and September, an examination of its weekly resolutions shows. The number covers contracts for goods and services, such as roadwork and engineering consulting. It excludes subsidies, real-estate transactions and leases, even though such contractual matters are found in the SEAO database.

However, The Gazette was unable to trace any contract in the SEAO database that was awarded at the executive committee’s April 6 meeting, the first one it held after the publication requirement went into effect. The contracts awarded at that meeting ranged from a $67,393 deal to purchase an infrared spectrometer from a single bidder to a five-year contract worth $9.2 million for bailiff services.

Yet other contracts awarded by the executive committee as recently as July were in the SEAO database.

Among the random checks by The Gazette, a $941,824 police contract to private investigation firm Bureau d’enquêtes civiles du Québec on June 20, 2011, is not in the SEAO database.

As another example, a host of contracts awarded by the executive committee at a May 11 meeting are absent from the SEAO database. The items include four separate contracts to different divisions of the construction firm Louisbourg SBC S.E.C., associated with businessman Antonio Accurso. The four contracts, for water-main work and roadwork, ranged from $645,571 to $2.3 million.

The city’s department of procurement plans to get all branches to publish contracts on the SEAO website by the end of the year, city spokesperson Gonzalo Nunez said in an email responding to The Gazette on Thursday.

“We’re currently training city employees on this file,” he wrote. “It’s a measure of transparency that we want to apply across the city, even if it means extra work and will lead us to manage a considerable amount of data.”

In the meantime, Nunez invited the public to file access-to-information requests for information on city contracts.

Under the legislation, municipal bodies are required to publish a list of contracts on the SEAO website at least once a month, and keep it posted for at least three years. The legislation also requires municipal bodies to provide a link on their websites to the SEAO database.

But there’s no policing of the database to ensure that municipal bodies are complying with the law, a spokesperson for the Municipal Affairs Department confirmed this week.

“There’s no systematic surveillance of the SEAO,” Caroline St. Pierre said.

“Municipalities are autonomous on this level.”

The department will investigate complaints, she said. As well, the department is currently checking on contract-awarding in a dozen municipalities, including Montreal, to see whether tendering rules are being respected, St. Pierre said. The department may spot cases where contracts aren’t being posted to the SEAO website that way, she said. Meanwhile, all municipalities are already obligated to table a written list of all contracts over $25,000 at each monthly council meeting, she added.

And there are no penalties for municipal bodies that don’t comply with the law, St. Pierre confirmed.

Even once Montreal starts posting all of its contracts in the SEAO database, it’s not clear how useful it will be to the public. For instance, it’s not possible to search the database by contractor’s name.

By comparison, the city of Chicago has a contract database that is searchable by contractor, payment, contract tender number and the date the bids were opened.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said the borough of Côte des Neiges-Notre Dame de Grâce published just 29 contracts from the 99 contractual matters it approved from April to September on the Quebec government's public database for calls for tenders. In fact, 36 contractual matters worth over $25,000 were approved, not 99. The rest were below that amount, and therefore not required by law to be published in the database. The Gazette regrets the error

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